This disclosure relates generally to presenting maintaining information describing users of an online system, and more specifically to determining whether to maintain information obtained from a client device in association with an online system user.
Online systems, such as social networking systems, allow users to connect to and to communicate with other users of the online system. Users may create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Online systems allow users to easily communicate and to share content with other online system users by providing content to an online system for presentation to other users. Content provided to an online system by a user may be declarative information provided by a user, status updates, check-ins to locations, images, photographs, videos, text data, or any other information a user wishes to share with additional users of the online system. An online system may also generate content for presentation to a user, such as content describing actions taken by other users on the online system.
Users frequently access content provided by an online system using one or more client devices. For example, a client device executes an application associated with the online system that provides content from the online system to a user of the client device. To improve user interaction with the online system, the online system allows a user of the client device to specify one or more settings of the application associated with the online system to personalize how the application provides content via the client device or to personalize information the application communicates to the online system from the client device. This allows a user of a client device to customize presentation of content from the online system when the user accesses the content from the client device.
However, multiple online system users may access content provided by the online system from a single client device. For example, multiple users have separate accounts on a tablet computer, and each user accesses content from the online system via the application associated with the online system executing on the tablet computer after logging into the tablet computer. Each user of the client device may maintain separate settings for the application associated with the online system to personalize how the application associated with the online system presents content to different users accessing content from the online system via the tablet computer. Settings for the application associated with the online system are locally stored on a client device, so the settings may be retrieved when different users login to the client device.
While locally storing settings for the application associated with the online system allows content presented from the online system to be personalized when presented to a user via the client device. However, if a user accesses content from the online system using another client device, the settings specified by the user and stored on the client device are not used when the content is presented. This may cause differences between content presented to the user by the client device and by another client device. However, when different users access content from the online system via a single client device, if the online system retrieves settings for the application associated with the online system stored on the client device, the retrieved settings may not apply to various users of the online system, so if the online system users the retrieved settings when presenting content to certain users via other client devices, the content may be presented in a manner that reduces a likelihood of the certain users interacting with the content